Don't spit your coffee out, but further rumours today make it more likely that the iPhone 5 will have a 4in screen.
Hitachi Displays and Sony Mobile Display Corporation are already shipping 4in LCD touch screens destined for next-gen iPhones, say "sources within Apple's Far Eastern supply chain", according to AppleInsider.
The …

Who in heck keeps their phones in the shirt pocket?

A recipe for disaster when going to the loo, methinks. Real men keep their phones in their trouser pockets, where larger sizes can be uncomfortable (and misleading).

But I have no problem with the iPhone going a tad bigger - just don't think it's going to make a heck of a lot of difference: I can get a similar increase by holding my iPhone 16 inches away from my eyes rather than 18".

The reason the iOS screen res leap went so well is because they doubled both the horizontal and vertical resolution. Thus making scaling the UI (and any graphics required) easy. Basically any apps can be scaled without changing the aspect ratio of the UI (ie without stretching it) and without using any black borders.

samsung

What are the chances that we'll all start being told by Apple that anything less than an OLED (or whatever their marketing department re-christen it) is sooo unacceptable on a phone and that they have created some magical new experience for the world. Conveniently forgetting that they're quite late to the OLED party, of course.

Most of the other manufacturers continually hand the high-margin sales to Apple by releasing their features in such an understated way that the general public don't have any awareness of them until the latest iWhatever gets released with it and the Apple marketing machine bulldozes the place. When will they learn....

Nice try Materialised, but fragmentation isn't about screen sizes

Fragmentation is about the fact that different Android devices have (potentially) widely varying capabilities and that there are so many "live" versions of the OS in the wild some of which have vendor specific/derived customisations and extensions.

But different screen sizes and resolutions are not a significant issue since Android has very good support for varying and various screen sizes and resolutions.

They WILL be a significant issue for iOS however, since their is no real support in any existing code for anything other than two screens - iPhone and iPad.

Add a new resolution or a new screen size and at the very least a whole new set of UI resources are required.

No, fragmentation is mainly about screen sizes

Producting a sensible UI at various resolutions and screen aspects is a pain in the hole, even on systems that support resolution independence. The initial pain is getting bitmaps to scale, but the real problem is laying out a UI on different shapes of screen. Symbian solved the first problem: all icons need to be .SVG format, so that they can scale better to other sizes, but even then, designing for different screen sizes takes skill and effort (even in Symbian3, the Nokia E6 has a 300+dpi 4:3 display, other devices are ~200dpi 9:16)

Ironically, iOS has Apple's Quartz, which is one the nicest resolution-independent systems I've used. Unfortunately, all of this good stuff will never be seen because "graphic designers" think that Photoshop is an acceptable tool for producing icons. Sadly, this attitude existed within Apple too...

On the story, it sounds like bull-pucky: Apple won't move from their nice integer mulitples of 320x480 - it would screw up hundreds of thousands of apps. These screens are more likely to go to Android devices. Plus, iOS's predominantly white backgrounds make it the most OLED-unfriendly system available.

Resolution independence

Apple scaled up graphics for the retina display very neatly--turned pixels into "points" with a "scale" factor. So old code works fine and often draws things at higher resolution even though it wasn't designed to.

Apple could easily futz with the screen resolution simply by changing the scale factor for graphics objects from 2 to some other number and all existing software would work fine.

The problem (and reason why I doubt they would do this) is that things that used to line up neatly on pixel boundaries would end up being antialiased and it would make everything look slightly blurry.